The New York Times at 6:30pm today shared this photo essay of citizens in Avdiivka. Pictured above:Bread was distributed by workers from the United Nations refugee agency.

The town’s chief of emergency services and a British photographer were among the wounded.

We have had many flare-ups before and yet somehow the sides have pulled back, reverting to an uneasy, often violent static confrontational stance,” Alexander Hug, deputy head of the OSCE ceasefire monitoring mission in Ukraine, said on Friday.

Now however the stakes are even higher, there is a potential humanitarian and ecological disaster about to unfold,” he added.